Hopes fade for federal electoral reform

Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef is joined by fellow MPs Mark Holland, right, and Greg Fergus as they speak to reporters in the foyer of the house of commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, June 2, 2016. (Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

OTTAWA – Any hope that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will keep his promise to reform Canada’s voting system in time for the next federal election all but vanished Thursday after his democratic institutions minister misrepresented the conclusions of a special all-party committee and accused it of shirking its job.

Maryam Monsef continued to insist that the government remains committed to Trudeau’s campaign promise and to working collaboratively with opposition parties on replacing the first-past-the-post electoral system. She said she still hopes to introduce legislation in the spring.

But Monsef flabbergasted opposition parties with a dismissive, hostile response to the majority report of the opposition-dominated committee on electoral reform, which recommended that the government design a new proportional voting system and hold a national referendum to gauge public support for it.

Liberal members of the committee dissented, arguing that Canadians are not sufficiently engaged in the issue as they urged Trudeau to abandon his self-imposed deadline to change the voting system in time for the October 2019 election.

Pressed by Conservatives and New Democrats in the House of Commons to accept the majority report, Monsef asserted that “the only consensus that the committee found was that there is no consensus on electoral reform.”

She then expressed disappointment that the committee didn’t recommend a specific voting model.

“On the main question on the hard choices that we had asked the committee to make, the members of the committee took a pass,” Monsef told the Commons.

“We asked the committee to help answer very difficult questions for us. It did not do that.”

In fact, the mandate given to the committee by Monsef was to “identify and conduct a study of viable alternate voting systems to replace the first-past-the-post system.” She did not direct the committee to recommend a specific voting model.

Monsef also misrepresented the majority report’s recommendation that any new proportional model designed by the government should score no more than 5 on the so-called Gallagher index, a mathematical formula for measuring the degree of disproportion between the share of votes received by parties and their share of seats in the legislature. The lower the score, the more proportional the outcome.

Monsef accused opposition parties of wanting to pose a referendum question on the “incomprehensible formula,” asking “would Canadians like to take the square root of the sum of the squares of the difference between the percentage of the seats for each party and the percentage of the votes cast.”

In fact, the index was recommended only as a tool to ensure the proportionality of whatever new system the government proposes. As for the referendum, the majority report recommended that Canadians be asked to choose between first-past-the-post and the proposed new system, leaving open the possibility that other voting models could be added to the mix.

Monsef, who has never disguised her dislike of the referendum idea, dismissed the united opposition front on the issue, noting that both the NDP and Greens expressed reservations about a referendum in their own supplementary reports.

The NDP and Green members agreed to drop their opposition to a referendum in order to win Conservative and Bloc support for a proportional voting model.

Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose called Monsef’s performance “an absolute disgrace” and said she might have called for the minister’s resignation had Trudeau been in the Commons.

Committee members, who worked long hours for five months, travelling the country and hearing from hundreds of experts and thousands of Canadians, compromised to come up with a consensus majority report, Ambrose said. She accused Monsef of insulting committee members because she doesn’t like their conclusions.

“Minister Monsef and Justin Trudeau are trying to find a way out of this because they don’t like the answer they got.”

NDP democratic reform critic Nathan Cullen said Monsef’s response raises more doubts about the government’s sincerity when it comes to reforming the voting system.

“You start to wonder at the authenticity, the honesty of who you’re dealing with because at some point you’ve got to say, ‘Okay, look, Trudeau. You made a promise to Canadians. There was no asterisk. There was no fine print … Let’s get it done.”’

The Liberals have sent numerous signals that their enthusiasm for electoral reform has waned since they won a majority of seats last fall – garnering less than 40 per cent of the popular vote in the process.

Trudeau has suggested that public interest in reform has diminished since the Liberals won power. And Monsef has repeatedly said she’s detected no consensus around any particular voting alternative and has warned that the government won’t proceed without the broad support of Canadians.

Cullen said a “strange scenario” seems to be developing, with “the Bloc Quebecois, the Conservative party, the NDP and the Greens finding enough room for consensus to help the Liberals keep a Liberal promise and the Liberals not so interested in it anymore.”

In their “supplementary” report, the committee’s Liberal members urged the government to undertake “a period of comprehensive and effective citizen engagement” before proposing any specific voting system, all of which they said “cannot be effectively completed before 2019.”

“We feel it would be irresponsible for the government to act in haste just to meet the 2019 deadline,” Liberal MP Matt DeCourcey told a news conference shortly after the report was tabled in the House of Commons.

But it was Trudeau himself who set what his MPs now view as an arbitrary deadline. Before, during and after the 2015 federal election he repeatedly promised it would be the last to be conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.

Monsef has conducted her own hearings and is about to launch a postcard campaign inviting 15 million Canadian households to take part in an online survey. She said the government will take into account all the feedback it receives, including from the committee, in crafting an alternative voting system.

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Hopes fade for federal electoral reform

Personally, this wasn’t even on the radar for me to vote for the grits, i always thought this favored loosing parties like the NDP and Green party anyway, fringe parties that never expect to be in government. This crap(ER) doesn’t help people get jobs in the country, doesn’t help increase voters wages, only creates more plum jobs and an increases in pay for MPs sitting on these committees. It does nothing to help the country, it doesn’t do anything to help the economy, so yes, put the headstone on this and move on. Election promises like this are not a deal breakers, they’re just little bumps in the road, and when the media and the opposition parties are in a tizz like they are going after you, that’s a good sign the government is doing it’s job, just ask Donald Trump.

While I’m not surprised that it’s not on your radar, as it’s like that for the vast majority of Canadians, I disagree it does nothing to help our country. How we vote plays a fundamental role and factor in the type of leaders and civil servants that form our government.

Changing our system changes the type of people that get elected, how they interact with their constituents, each other, and how they develop public policy. In other words, all the things you are concerned about: economy, jobs etc are affected. Improving the electoral process can absolutely have a positive impact on the things that get the average Canadians attention ie pocket book issues.

The report recommends:
” That the referendum propose a proportional electoral system that achieves a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less; and
 That the Government complete the design of the alternate electoral system that is proposed on the referendum ballot prior to the start of the referendum campaign period.”

For anyone who doesn’t know what a Gallagher Index score of 5 or less implies, it means that the number of MPs that each party gets must match its proportion of the national vote very closely. This would require a rather drastic change from our present system. By not recommending an actual system that meets the requirement, the committee basically punted to the government to design a system that most Canadians would find unacceptable. It’s easy to understand why Minister Monsef was disappointed.

First, an RSS score on a small number of weighted factors has poor statistical confidence but more importantly the notion that the assignment of seats should correspond to the national popular vote is non-constitutional while practically this metric is insensitive to distribution; for example, the party in power could fill all of it’s seats with Torontonians and Torontonians in any case would control federal politics. Canadians in Inuvik or even Nanaimo already have a tough enough time having their concerns addressed. So far this has been all about party politics where local representation is suppressed.

As an engaged and active Liberal, never have I been so outraged, so embarrassed, so disappointed.

Francis Scarpaleggia went on national television to say a Liberal platform promise isn’t so much a genuine commitment to act, but rather just a way to engage–just making conversation apparently. Wish I knew that before donating time and money and emotional capital and travel to policy conventions.

The party of evidence-based decision making (also a separate platform promise but since they mean absolutely nothing, another one under the bus is no big deal) doesn’t like math anymore. Well, I personally never did like math but greatly respect the mathematicians who do it and fortunately come up with things like this: http://election-modelling.ca/overview/allSimulations.html Which is a bit of a hard website to understand–but entirely possible since I can understand it. And we don’t have to understand it because we aren’t electoral system designers, we are voters. We don’t need to be electricians to turn on a light, we don’t need to be mechanical engineers to go over a bridge, etc.

Let us count the hours between a Liberal MP telling Canadians never to believe a Liberal campaign promise, and a Liberal cabinet minister throwing the concepts of evidence and truth out the window, and Trudeau repudiating those statements. Anyway, that’s the most urgent story from this ugly day.

How about a system where (instead of a single vote) in Parliament, each MP casts as many votes as he received in the election itself. In addition, after the election, the pool of votes from losing candidates would be apportioned to winning candidates from their party in the same ratio as each winner’s share of the total winning votes cast for his party. That way, no fringe party that is unable to win even a single riding gets anything; but each real party’s supporters get proportional representation.

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